1. Who does the evaluations? Bill Wayne, owner of Cedarcroft Farm Bed & Breakfast in Warrensburg, Missouri. My first visit to a B&B was the Benn Conger Inn in Groton, NY in 1982; my wife (Sandra) & I have been running Cedarcroft since 1988. I've been involved in my state association (BBIM) since 1989 and joined PAII in 1991.

2. Why are you doing all this work? I managed advertising for BBIM and had the need to decide where BBIM should put its money. I put the results of my research onto paper for our members. Then, I decided to add it to a home page I'd recently put up. I was approached by another innkeeper about co-authoring a hard copy pamphlett on the subject, but he decided to go solo. JoAnn Bell of PAII and Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts suggested I ought to rate these services, so I started developing INNSTAR in late 1996.

In March, 2001, I decided to take advantage of my experience by doing low-level design and webhosting for B&Bs.

I now have placed Google (tm) Adwords on major pages, with those pages to be expanded soon.

5. How are the ratings arrived at? Look at the Criteria page.

5a.What do the terms "Front Door" and "Back Door" mean? These terms, were used by Steve Demarest in his "INNkeepers INNternet INNformation" describes the method used by a guidebook author to promote his pages.

• "Front Door" means that the guide promotes the guidebook only - a browser must find the guidebook to find an inn.
• "Back Door" means that the guide promotes individual Inn pages, as well, so a browser can find an inn using search engines without needing to go through the guidebook's lead-in pages.

6. Why a rating system? With so many services out there, even an early list of just basic information scrolled through over 50Kb of data and printed to 8-10 pages. With this system, I can provide more helpful information without overloading the user's system.

7. Are you going to expand to services listing RSO's and other types of lodging? No. I'm having enough difficulty keeping up with the B&B guidebooks.

8. Which services have you chosen to be listed on? The fact that I chose to advertise with certain services did not affect how they were rated (although, obviously, some of the same thought processes & research that go into the ratings also affect my advertising decisions); as a small Inn my advertising budget precludes some otherwise attractive guides. Innkeepers interested in my philosophy of picking guides should see my Innkeepers' Info page.